Your voice is the color of a robin’s breast,

     And there’s a sweet sob in it like rain—still rain in the night.

Among the leaves of the trumpet-tree, close to his nest,

     The pea-dove sings, and each note thrills me with strange delight

Like the words, wet with music, that well from your trembling throat.

          I’m afraid of your eyes, they’re so bold,

          Searching me through, reading my thoughts, shining like gold.

But sometimes they are gentle and soft like the dew on the lips of the eucharis

Before the sun comes warm with his lover’s kiss,

    You are sea-foam, pure with the star’s loveliness,

Not mortal, a flower, a fairy, too fair for the beauty-shorn earth,

All wonderful things, all beautiful things, gave of their wealth to your birth:

      O I love you so much, not recking of passion, that I feel it is wrong,

            But men will love you, flower, fairy, non-mortal spirit burdened with flesh,

Forever, life-long.

not understanding how we celebrate

Our bodies. Every day we separate.

      — Marilyn Hacker

September, and the great stillness 

of moonless night and cooling air, the city 

in blue pockets in the hills, and just 

under your hands, the current

of what’s forgotten. All week long, while 

you were running, or reading, your forefinger

blurring the type, one season was slipping 

into another, as lovers weave themselves 

across a bed, odor of yeast 

from the beer bread lifting through 

the oven, the dog’s pad cracked, and in

class, you were watching one student 

blink at another. There’s a time 

to believe in love, you’d thought, 

watching her rub her arm hair, and him 

shift in his shirt, but then you believe all

things end, and you’d tried so carefully

to explain what Marilyn Hacker meant,

how we “wake to ourselves, exhausted, 

in the late,” before you thought better

about it, staring down the rows, and cited

the fused limbs, and raised unlettered power

instead, the poem’s words comets’ tails

on blackboard. Now, you are finally leaving 

campus, content this time your heart 

has bettered the howl for sugar, your body 

hot from the work of itself, when you push 

through the glass door into fall—

and you remember a draft which was

just like this once, when, past 

the dorm curfew, Tim was clutching 

your elbows beside a lake, the air cricket

-thick, Cassiopeia encrusted in her collar. 

There is no loneliness as knowing. Years

later, when you were drunk yet again, 

at Le Lido, swimming the booth, 

the waiter—cloudy in his captain’s suit—sat 

with you. The gold-enameled dancer

was still mounting her white horse. He poured     

the champagne. You sipped it softly.

Their muscles erupted into the shivering

other as they strutted circles against

the stage, animal and woman, and you were 

grateful no one said a word. How 

could you have named the chill

of her breasts, the terrible hot fur? 

It was that gift of silence which happens

between strangers, out of country. Then 

you’d walked home, tall cathedrals

bristling in the baubles of their unrung

bells. You’d turned your collar up 

against the coming cold as you turn

up your jacket now, surprised

by the suddenness of the season 

(or your own inattention to the small

shifts), your breath crystal in air—

and each stripe, marking separation

down the asphalt, is lamped

and glistening, eerie as snow, solstice

certain as the short drive ahead, to when

you must walk up to your dark, quiet

house, sink your key into the lock.

His priestly gestures, consecrating the broken eggs,

hands moving over the stove, slabs of meat

skittering in grease, drop biscuits big as a cat’s

head, threaded with cheese.

Him, making the fountain, making lantana, acanthus,

making bloom and ripple, song, making the birds.

My husband, the blue room, the bright room, best china,

best silver lifted from a box in the closet,

its red beds of best silver, put back later for later.

My husband who is not my husband who is still mine.

See him, crying in the Dublin airport—

he doesn’t want you to see. Can you see

the eucomis, its waxy leaves, its stalk blossoming

in the hot sun, pushing up among the marigolds?

Scars from this or that on shin or back, wrist or hand,

the way the garden loves him, the bees.

Him among the lilies, his hands lilies, his mouth

a twist of quince, his scent.

My husband among the lilies.

My husband, sauntering down the aisles. Him, sauntering

down the aisles at the flea market, dust settling

on everything, his small flashlight, his blue eyes,

his sound of geese, a train. Look,

something glitters and is gone. My husband, the gold

in the trees, falling, and him, a coverlet of mulch

across the beds, or asleep, the heat of him,

the hot water bottle of him, the cat purring at our feet.

My husband who is not my husband who is still mine.

The blue walls say so, the orchid deciding to bloom again.

A Memory

You lay so still in the sunshine, 
So still in that hot sweet hour— 
That the timid things of the forest land 
Came close; a butterfly lit on your hand, 
Mistaking it for a flower.

You scarcely breathed in your slumber, 
So dreamless it was, so deep— 
While the warm air stirred in my veins like wine, 
The air that had blown through a jasmine vine, 
But you slept—and I let you sleep.

We were all Jack Gilbert’s lovers, not in the world

but in the poems, in the world of the poems, dying

on the rocky broken spurs of hard islands in a blue

country across the sea, lovers carried in his arms

for decades sometimes, more, the wind a character

that refused to lift the center of the word pain, where

vowels fall into the letter n the way the summer,

wheat-blazed and feral, pours into the cold weeks

of November, winter in its bones to come. Jack

loved us, not as a god or a devil, however nuanced,

but as one who must attend to the difficult harvest

of a life, to the losses and the simple grain that we might,

if we listen beyond the howling in our own hearts, hear 

him singing about as he carries us up the dead mountain.

                 Why I love thee?

     Ask why the seawind wanders,

Why the shore is aflush with the tide,

Why the moon through heaven meanders;

Like seafaring ships that ride

On a sullen, motionless deep;

      Why the seabirds are fluttering the strand

       Where the waves sing themselves to sleep

         And starshine lives in the curves of the sand!